In this context, “new” is a relative term, given that so much material touching upon religion is old and often obscure. When the itch develops I can go to Google Scholar, plug in search terms related to religion, and have 50 articles in short order. Many will have been published years ago in obscure journals and have been largely forgotten — or worse, were never acknowledged because they were read only by the author’s peers, which may mean that perhaps 100 people read the article. Discovering these articles, many of which are brilliant, is an immense pleasure. Though I wish I could cover all of them, other projects like books, work, and teaching prevent this. Speaking of books, during the recent course of writing one I’ve had the pleasure of reading several articles which deserve mention. Over the next few months, I’ll be covering as many as I can. Some will have more coverage and some less. My hope is to bring attention to superb or provocative work which languishes in the archives.

For those interested in historic Native American religion, I strongly recommend “The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege” (1971) by Patricia Albers and Seymour Parker. This is one of those rare or old school articles in cultural anthropology where the authors formed a hypothesis and tested it with ethnographic data. They hypothesized that the social construction and cultural import of the vision experience would vary in accord with societal type. They identified three kinds of Plains societies: peripheral hunter-gatherers (e.g., Shoshoni, Flathead, Kutenai), True Plains societies (e.g., Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow), and peripheral farming groups (e.g., Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa). Those familiar with Native American ethnohistory will recognize these as valid ecological-economic classifications. All lived on the Plains and all cultivated the vision experience to one degree or another.

Rita Joyce Copyright

As predicted, each group constructed and construed the vision experience differently. Moreover, the differences systematically varied between groups. The authors make a strong case for a regular relationship between type of society and type of vision experience. Before anyone’s eyes start to glaze thinking this is one of those dessicated research projects demanding that anthropology be a nomothetic science, it isn’t. The authors have a deft touch and deep understanding of cultural complexity. They are quite sensitive to lived experiences. I’ve read most of the material on the Plains vision complex, and this article is one of the best. It brings some order and understanding to a field content to collect cultural butterflies in the past (i.e., Ruth Benedict’s work on the vision complex).

The summation is reminiscent of Julian Steward, and worth quoting at length for those who don’t have institutional access to the article:

Given the findings of this paper with respect to the relationship between social-structural variables and the vision experience, it would seem reasonable to assume that socially recognized visions provided an ideology to “explain” and to support the existing societal opportunity structure. In hunting and gathering societies they served to explain inequalities in personal talents and achievements. In True Plains societies they no longer merely validated differences in personal attributes and achievements but represented a means for justifying existing differences in wealth. Finally, in farming societies the institutionalization of standardized visions served to validate the transfer of inherited property and to legitimize ascribed status positions. Further, these visions supported and reinforced the formalization of status inequalities.

This paper also suggests that the specific functions of visions as a form of anticipatory socialization were not uniform. While it seems clear that in all of the societies under consideration visions have an important role in motivating people to conform to existing institutions, they vary in terms of the nature of the conformity that is encouraged. In the peripheral hunting and gathering societies, as well as in the True Plains societies, most socially recognized visions can be seen to function in encouraging personal achievements, initiative, and independence. However, when the symbolism in visions becomes standardized and is associated with social groups, as in the peripheral farming societies, it appears that visions served to reinforce anchorage in and dependency upon organized collectivities. Therefore, depending on the symbolism manifested in visions, they can be seen as rein- forcing either psychological independence or dependence.

Our paper supports the position that the relative importance of purely individualistically defined religious experiences decreases as one moves to societies with greater economic surplus and social complexity. The growth of status inequality and formalized modes of status allocation are accompanied by increasing restrictions on the incidence, occasions, and participants in personal-spontaneous religious experience that are publicly sanctioned. Private religious experiences, however, do not disappear but increasingly become articulated with formal social groups and their activities. Further, when societies develop larger and more complex corporate structures, such religious phenomena no longer provide a viable or socially acceptable mechanism for status allocation and the assumption of secular power. Societal myths develop to provide a satisfactory rationale for identity with and anchorage in a more complex sociopolitical structure. There is another important factor, however, that comes into play: namely, the increasing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, power, and privileges, and the increasing stabilization of this differentiation. This influence increasingly serves to limit access to and control over supernatural powers. The ideology underlying the vision thus serves (a la Marx) to support the existing distribution of secular power.

That’s really good stuff. The implications for other societies and religions are pretty obvious.

Reference:

Albers, Patricia, & Parker, Seymour. (1971). The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 27 (3), 203-233

The discovery that two events, symbols, thoughts or texts, while so utterly separated by time and space that they could not “really” be connected, seem, nevertheless, to be the same or to be speaking directly to one another raises the possibility of a secret interconnection of things that is the scholar’s most cherished article of faith.

– Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual”

With this observation, the famous historian of religion touches on my favorite aspect of scholarship: seeing connections in disparate things. While Smith was commenting on the subtle connections at the heart of both ritual and scholarship, I am often reminded of such coincidences when one thing mysteriously leads to another, forming a train of novel thought which excites.

This happened to me after reading How the Power of Positive Thinking Won Scientific Credibility, in which Hans Villarica interviews psychologist Micheal F. Scheier. Scheier’s 1985 study, “Optimism, Coping, and Health: Assessment and Implications of Generalized Outcome Expectancies,” demonstrated that dispositional optimism is variable and healthy, leading to a range of better outcomes across life domans. A raft of subsequent studies have confirmed these findings. In evolutionary terms, it appears that dispositional optimism is adaptive.

When I read about Scheier’s studies, I was just finishing Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior, an extraordinary book that transports us into world of the Wyoming-Montana Crow just before their buffalo hunting way of life disappeared. Although many books attempt to take us there, few succeed. Most were written by anthropologists who conducted interviews many years after the fact, and while these ethnohistories are culturally comprehensive, they are short on biographical and personal detail. They give us general ethnographic pictures that don’t really bring people or culture to life. Historians often do better with this but too often focus on big people and events, making it hard to imagine what Plains peoples were doing, saying, and thinking on a daily basis. Two Leggings does this.

The story behind the book, which reads like a historical novel, is remarkable. In 1918, businessman William Wildschut moved to Billings, Montana near the Crow Reservation. He soon got to know several elders and became particularly interested in Two Leggings (1847-1923), a fairly typical Crow warrior-hunter who never became an important or famous chief. Over the next few years, they often met with Wildschut recording the details of Two Leggings’ life. When finished, Wildschut deposited nearly 600 pages of rough and detailed notes at the Smithsonian, where they languished until Peter Nabokov discovered them in the 1960s. Realizing the value and potential of the notes, Nabokov painstakingly worked the material into a coherent life-story told from the first person perspective.

Two Leggings was an ambitious man born into a culture that strongly encouraged male ambition, whether on the hunt or warpath. Ambition, however, was not enough — one obtained success and rose to prominence not by deeds alone, but through deeds that were directed and validated by spiritual help and guidance. If the spirits bestowed gifts through visions, one could be confident — or optimistic, that success was to be had. If the spirits were neither generous nor favorable, confidence would plummet.

Not lacking personal ambition, Two Leggings throughout his life sought spiritual assistance and validation, though with only limited success. This seriously affected his confidence, and at times he was less than optimistic about his prospects. Due to lack of success with the spirits, a minor sense of dread pervades his life. He watches others seek and receive spiritual sanction. In nearly all cases, these fortunate ones set forth with boundless optimism, sure in the fact they were doing the right thing and would be successful doing it. In many cases, they were. All the major chiefs had strong visions and powerful spirit helpers.

I can’t help but think that here we have a unexpected connection. Scheier’s psychological studies on dispositional optimism surely says something about Crow and other Plains Indians cultures. Because it is healthy to have confidence, and one gains confidence through visions and signs, I see this as one of those connections of which Smith speaks.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the supposed exemplar of such religion came from the Australian Aborigines, and in the 1970s the south African Bushmen or San were added as exemplars. In addition to these two allegedly primordial paradigms, many viewed native American peoples as bearers of ancient supernatural traditions. Others thought that isolated Amazonian and Melanesian societies could shed light on the subject.

What many of these reconstruction projects have in common is the assumption that all such peoples were frozen in time and that their “religions,” which are not isomorphic with Western concepts and definitions of “religion,” did not change over time. We know, of course, that none of this correct — all such peoples have complex histories of migration, contact, and change. While some may have carried on in ways that more closely resembled ancient lifeways, this doesn’t mean their “religions” (a word and concept foreign to most or all of them) are static models of the Paleolithic past. At best, they can serve as rough analogues that may have more in common with ancient ideas than do modern or “world religions.” At worst, they are considered to be pristine exemplars of original religion.

While it might seem that anthropologists are aware of these issues, duly cautious, and provide the requisite qualifications, reminders are occasionally needed. One such reminder came in 1989 with the publication of Edwin Wilmsen’s Land of the Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari, which ignited a major and acrimonious debate about the history of south African Bushmen. Wilmsen argued, with some ideological zeal, that the San were not pristine hunter-gatherers but instead were marginalized peoples who became foragers only recently and as a result of larger economic processes. For all the book’s faults, Wilmsen demonstrated that the Bushmen had a more complex history than was supposed and were not pristine exemplars of the ancient past.

Similar kinds of debates have surrounded Australian Aborigines, whose “religion” known as “the Dreaming” has long been the darling of scholars. Durkheim’s famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) relied on a sketchy construction of Aboriginal supernaturalism. While this construction was brought up to date by Mircea Eliade’s studies on “Australian Religions,” Eliade’s phenomenological commitments were distorting. Knowing this, several scholars have continued with the reconstruction or recovery process. While I haven’t followed the details, in 2009 whatever was happening prompted Max Charlesworth to issue some reminders:

Again, the radically ahistorical approach that Radcliffe-Brown introduced into anthropology de-emphasized cultural and religious change and development, and made it appear that Aboriginal societies and their religions were wholly static, conservative and ‘timeless’. However, in actual fact there is continual change and innovation in Aboriginal religions with sacred songs and rituals being exchanged and bartered between regional groups within the bounds of the foundation charters of the Dreamings of particular groups. Indeed, the various Dreamings have themselves often undergone change and innovation.

[I]n actual fact the Dreaming myths of many Aboriginal peoples have creatively assimilated elements from other groups. The most striking example of this is the influence of Muslim fishermen in Macassar in Indonesia on the Yolngu people of Elcho Island in northeast Arnhem Land. The Macassans were engaged in the collection of trepang and they came down with the trade winds each year from the early 1700s until 1907, establishing close economic and social relations with the Aboriginal people. As a result of this contact, an important Yolngu ritual about a Dreaming figure Walitha ‘walitha (in other words, Allah) was developed.

Here we have history impinging on our idealistic notions about what Aboriginal “religion” represents. In addition, there are problems of secrecy and translation:

Finally, a note about the role of secrecy in Aboriginal religions. For Western anthropologists observing the canons of scientific rationalism, there can be no ‘secrets’ since anthropologists are committed to public disclosure of their findings. However, for Aboriginal groups there are secrets not only between men and women but also between old and young, the initiated and non-initiated, and insiders and outsiders. Religious knowledge is ‘dangerous’ if it is divulged to the wrong people at the wrong time. [F]rom this point of view, the very attempt to investigate Aboriginal religion necessarily puts a public construction upon something that is essentially non-public.

The same is true of translating Aboriginal religious concepts into Western European terms. For example, the Ancestor Spirits are neither gods nor moral exemplars and one cannot use monotheistic language about them. In fact, the specific terrains, lands or ‘countries’ of the various Aboriginal groups are the crucial religious phenomena. As it has been put, Aboriginal religions are ‘geosophical’ and not theosophical.

To make a long, partial, and always changing story short, we must take our constructions of other traditions with several grains of cautionary salt.

References:

Charlesworth, Max. (2009). Anthropological Approaches to “Primitive” Religions Sophia, 48 (2), 119-125 DOI: 10.1007/s11841-009-0096-5

Eliade, Mircea. (1966). Australian Religions: An Introduction. Part I History of Religions, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1086/462538

With this telos in mind, evolutionary theists assume that the things modern religions sometimes do, such as encourage altruism, must have been embryonically present in the ancient animist past. My primary objection to this argument has long been that animist-shamanist “religion” isn’t much concerned with altruism or “morality.” It’s usually more instrumental in its goals and concerned with things such as the hunt, healing, war, and weather.

But I just read something that has changed my mind. I’ve been looking in the wrong place for evidence of altruism in animist-shamanist beliefs and injunctions. There are no direct injunctions — do this or don’t do that — related to altruism. They are to be found at a deeper level, buried in the cosmology and epistemology of the animist worldview. This epiphany came when I encountered what Nurit Bird-David calls “the cosmic economy of sharing” that is embedded in animism. Such constructs are common to hunter-gatherers who have immediate return economic systems, and are likely representative of ideas that humans had for tens of thousands of years before agriculture.

It seems odd that the cosmic economy idea isn’t found in Bird-David’s more recent (1999) and comprehensive re-assessment of animism but in an earlier (1992) article which discusses the historical impact and empirical validity of Marshall Sahlins’ famous essay on the ontological joys of foraging. During the seven years between the two articles, Bird-David seems to have dropped the cosmic economy of sharing idea which I find so illuminating.

In his essay, Sahlins contends that the idea of scarcity is not a fact but instead is an ideological feature of all agricultural, industrial, and modern societies. This idea usually manifests as fear or desire. We either fear not having enough or we desire more, and all of this is predicated on taken-for-granted scarcity. Sahlins exposes scarcity as ideology by contrasting it with foraging societies which aren’t premised on scarcity and don’t take it for granted. Sahlins explains this difference empirically, by arguing that hunter-gatherers abound in resources and thus are “affluent.”

Bird-David isn’t buying Sahlins’ explanation, primarily because it is based on small-sample studies of hunter-gatherers that were in various ways flawed or questionable. When corrected, it appears that foragers work hard and desire more than was supposed. If this is so, then from where does the hunter-gatherer idea of affluence or abundance come? It is undeniably present in foraging societies, even during times of actual scarcity. It comes, Bird-Davis observes, from their cosmological and animist metaphors.

The cosmic economy of sharing is a natural consequence or logical result of animism, which is the attribution of life or vital force to plants, animals, landscapes, and weather. Having animated and constructed the world as being filled with non-human life, foragers can relate and interact with it. They can, in other words, socialize with everything that inhabits their singular cosmos. They do so through a variety of rituals and myths.

If we stopped at this point, and didn’t consider the deeper implications, this would be unremarkable. We could view it as more or less standard Tylorian animism that amounts to so much magical or pre-scientific thinking. But Bird-David doesn’t stop here because this animism is deeply imbricated with the most salient feature of foraging economies: sharing. The closest thing to a formal rule among hunter-gatherers is the sharing injunction. Those who have food and shelter must share food and shelter. In a sharing economy, maintained partly by relational ritual and partly by mythical metaphor, there is welfare and insurance for all.

When the (sharing) cosmos is considered in conjunction with the (sharing) economy, things begin to make sense. Bird-David identifies four features to the cosmic economy of sharing found in foraging societies:

1.  All animated agencies, or what we call “nature,” socialize with individual hunter-gatherers;

2.  The animated agencies, or what we call “nature,” give food and gifts to everyone regardless of prior kinship ties or reciprocal obligations;

3.  The people regard themselves as children and relatives of animated agencies or what we call “nature”; and

4.  People envision their connection to the animated agencies or “nature” as bonds of sharing between relatives.

Given this cosmos, the proper ritual, and rule observance, everything falls into place. People are born of an animated nature which then supplies the stuff of life.  This otherwise inanimate “stuff” has been shared and given as gift by animate nature. The transitive property is then applied to this premise: because animated nature has shared and given to me, so must I share and give to others (who are my actual or fictive relatives).

So there it is. Altruism has been hiding in the cosmological-epistemological bush all along. A bird in hand may be worth two in the bush, but only if the bird has been ritually obtained and mythically shared.

In the cold language of evolutionary biology, the animist way looks and feels fairly adaptive. Among foragers, this code of conduct is known simply as “the Way.” It is neither set off nor demarcated as being supernatural or religious. This is apparently why it took me so long to see it.

References:

Bird‐David, Nurit. (1999). “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40 (S1) DOI: 10.1086/200061

Bird-David, Nurit. (1992). Beyond “The Original Affluent Society”: A Culturalist Reformulation. Current Anthropology, 33 (1), 25-34

SPIEGEL: Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?

Sedláček: Mankind’s oldest stories tell us that greed is always Janus-faced. It is an engine of progress, but it’s also the cause of our collapse. Being constantly dissatisfied and always wanting more seems to be an innate natural phenomenon, forming the heart of our civilization. The original sin of the first human couple in the Garden of Eden was the result of greed.

SPIEGEL: Not of temptation and curiosity?

Sedláček: Desire and curiosity are sisters. The snake merely awakened a desire in Eve that was already dormant inside of her. According to Genesis, the forbidden tree was a feast for the eyes.

SPIEGEL: Just like the suggestive images of modern advertising.

Sedláček: Eve and Adam grab the opportunity and eat the fruit. The original sin has the character of excessive, unnecessary consumption. It is not of a sexual nature. A desire for something she doesn’t need is awakened in Eve. The living conditions in paradise were complete, and yet everything God had given the two wasn’t enough. In this sense, greed isn’t just at the birthplace of theoretical economics, but also at the beginning of our history. Greed is the beginning of everything.

SPIEGEL: So evil is the result of insatiability?

Sedláček: The demands of people are a curse of the gods. In Greek mythology, the story of Pandora, the first woman, who opens her jar out of curiosity, thereby releasing poverty, hunger and disease into the world, tells the same story as the Bible. In Babylonian culture, the Gilgamesh epic shows how desire rips man out of the harmony of nature…..The economics of equilibrium are doomed to failure. Eve’s desire — in economic terms, her demand — will never subside. And Adams’s offer to toil by the sweat of his brow will never be enough.

If we are talking about the human condition since the advent of agriculture, Sedlacek’s story has a great deal of validity. Sedlacek errs, however, in asserting that greed — always wanting more — is an “innate natural phenomenon” that marks the “beginning of our history.” This is a common error whether we are talking about economic history or religious history.

It arises from the illusion that everything essentially began with the Neolithic transition and “civilization.” As this myth goes, there was no history or society for the people who hunted and gathered for tens of thousands of years before settlements and cities. But these people, and some of their descendants who continued foraging until recently, had history. This history suggests that greed — always wanting more — is not an “innate natural phenomenon.”

Despite its faults, Marshall Sahlins’ classic essay “The Original Affluent Society” remains instructive on these issues. People everywhere and at all times haven’t been driven by greed. Given this fact, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that supernatural sanctions haven’t always surrounded greed. It was the reformist Axial Age religious movements, responsive to the destructive aftermaths of unfettered greed, that made it a spiritual and hence moral issue.

All this aside, there are less misogynist ways to read the Edenic myth. Sedlacek saddles Eve with the original sin of greed. I read it differently. As I see it (or because it suits my purposes), Eve is the courageous heroine who chose knowledge. She wasn’t the passive victim of temptation or seduction. There is no shame in that.

"Eve in the Garden" by Anna Lea Merritt (1885)

When asked about the relationship between religions and WoW, Bainbridge noted that WoW religions aren’t taken seriously, which led him to this:

The horrendous question that always troubles me is, what if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being? What does science do then? Could there be some other stage of development in which we express ourselves through a kind of protean self in numerous realities with different levels of faith or suspension of disbelief appropriate to each of them?

This is an interesting way of putting things. Bainbridge seems personally troubled by the “horrendous” possibility that religions are factually false.

There is a long tradition of considering this possibility and asking what it would mean if religions are false. Greek philosophers pondered the question and came to different conclusions. Plato favored illusions. Marx was untroubled by them. Nietzsche was much troubled by religious falsity or the metaphorical possibility that God was dead.

I also find curious Bainbridge’s question: What would science do if religions are false? My sense is not much. Humans routinely harbor all kinds of false beliefs, which science acknowledges and studies. Religious beliefs shouldn’t come in for any special treatment or dispensation.

Later in the interview, Bainbridge comments:

The difference between faith and fantasy might not have been very distinct in ancient times, and it’s possible that we will move towards a time when instead of religion, people’s hopes can be expressed in something that’s acknowledged to be a fantasy but also, on some level, sort of real. WoW might exemplify that kind of post-religious future.

It seems fairly certain there was no distinction between faith and fantasy in the past. These ideas hadn’t even been formulated. The very concept of “faith” is historically recent. Although the history of “faith” is complex, the idea that religion is a matter of belief or non-belief arose conjunction with the realization that ideas could be demonstrated to be either true or false, and that there were competing belief systems.

Once it was realized that ideas about the supernatural can be true or false and that not all these ideas can simultaneously be true, belief-choices had to be made. Hence the origins of “faith.”

In yet more ancient times, before the Neolithic transition, the supernatural wasn’t a matter of “belief” or “faith.” It was a way of (falsely) perceiving and (beneficially) making sense — what Nurit Bird-David aptly calls relational epistemology.

These answers aren’t surprising given our embeddedness in a culture whose dominant form of religion claims that life and death acquire meaning only within its milieu. Aside from the obvious objection that religion can intensify the fear of death for those who worry about hell and predestination, there is another: religions focused on meaning in life and purpose in death (i.e., some kind of afterlife) are relative newcomers to the supernatural world. They are post-Neolithic.

The domestication of plants and animals had profound consequences which can be summed with a series: sedentism, surplus, specialization, stratification, slavery, and sickness. Life in agricultural societies is fundamentally different from life in foraging societies. It is only in the former that people spend inordinate amounts of time wondering about the meaning or purpose of life and death. The previously summed series can have this existential effect.

None of this is to say that foraging or nomadic lifeways don’t present their own sets of challenges, because they do. These concerns, however, typically aren’t existential. Life among kin, however harsh, doesn’t present as absurd, dislocated, or senseless. There is a reason why hunter-gatherer ethnohistories don’t record people contemplating or despairing over “the meaning of it all.” This reason has nothing to do with intellectual abilities or the progress of thought. It has everything to do with the lifeways and conditions which spawn these kinds of questions.

Having said all this, there is little doubt that such questions arose after agriculture and became acute with industrialization. For many, such as Leo Tolstoy, even the consolations of religion were not enough to quell the twin fears of meaning and mortality. In this riveting piece on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Jordan Smith discusses Tolstoy’s novella and its influence:

The story’s literary merits were never in doubt, but its status as thanatology took some time to develop. It failed to register with European and American psychologists for most of the 20^th century, probably because Freud’s brand of psychoanalysis emphasized dreams, sex and childhood, relegating death largely to the background.

But in 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. In it, Becker argued that the fear of death “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Man’s subconscious fear of death and desire to transcend its inevitability leads him to create or achieve something “heroic”, so that the immortality of that creation or act might redeem the mortality of its maker. Fear of death is universal, and denial of it is equally cross-cultural.

Tolstoy’s story also imprinted on Irvin Yalom, the Stanford psychiatrist whose therapy seeks to ameliorate isolation and meaninglessness:

Yalom relies on The Death of Ivan Ilych in two important books. In Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Yalom writes, “No one has ever described the deep irrational belief in our own specialness more powerfully or poignantly than Tolstoy . . . through the lips of Ivan Ilych.” According to Yalom, humans develop a false sense of specialness as a defense against the certainty of death. “[D]eep, deep down, each of us believes, as does Ivan Ilych, that the rule of mortality applies to others but certainly not to ourselves.”

Nearly thirty years later, Yalom again turned to Tolstoy and Becker in Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008). There he argues that death anxiety is lessened by the sense that one has lived a full, meaningful life. Ilych “is dying so badly because he has lived so badly,” he writes (emphasis in original).

It would be churlish to argue that existential angst isn’t real or that death isn’t cause for doubt. Since the Neolithic, religions (especially the Axial movements) have been grappling with meaning and mortality. This doesn’t mean, however, that humans have always been haunted by these questions or that religions originated to address them.

Post Postscript

In this piece on death and fear, Stephen Cave states: “This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. That religions are very much a product of our yearning for immortality is perhaps obvious.” Taking this as a universal and ahistorical given, Cave then discusses how Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam deal with death.

This illustrates my historical point perfectly well. These Axial traditions are, in their own ways, much concerned with death and continuing life or immortality. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that these relatively modern religions speak to the evolution of supernatural beliefs or that these faiths somehow account for the origins of supernaturalism. They don’t.

The death terror and death responses are unique to certain kinds of societies and religions which grow out of these are not human universals. These religions grew from societies in which death was occurring in frequencies and ways never before seen in human history. It makes sense that they would respond to these vastly increased scales of death.

Though it isn’t possible to do Jaynes justice in a short space, his most famous idea was that the ancient human mind was of two parts: it was “bicameral.” Inspired by research showing the brain is right-left specialized, Jaynes hypothesized that in the evolutionary past the left brain must have been completely separated from the right brain. The effect, according to Jaynes, would have been disquieting: language generated in the left brain would have been interpreted by the right brain as coming from outside or somewhere else. Ancient people, in other words, were functionally lobotomized and regularly experienced auditory hallucinations. These voices were called gods and this supposedly explains the origin of religion. For Jaynes, the bicameral mind lacked what he calls “consciousness.”

With this hypothesis in hand Jaynes began scouring the historical record looking for evidence of bicamerality. In the Iliad, an ancient oral poem finally written down around 800 BCE, Jaynes thinks he has found it:

[I]f you take the generally accepted oldest parts of the Iliad and ask, “Is there evidence of consciousness?” the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world.

Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear. Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest that they were universal.

Jaynes must then explain the origin and evolution of the bicameral or “unconscious” mind, which he does here:

But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? Let us go back to the beginning of civilization in several sites in the Near East around 9000 B.C. It is concomitant with the beginning of agriculture. The reason the bicameral mind may have existed at this particular time is because of the evolutionary pressures for a new kind of social control to move from small hunter-gatherer groupings to large agriculture based towns or cities. The bicameral mentality could do this since it enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.

I think that verbal hallucinations had evolved along with the evolution of language during the Neanderthal era as aids to attention and perseverance in tasks, but then became the way of ruling larger groups.

Setting aside for a moment the objection that modern humans are only minimally descended from Neanderthals and we don’t know whether they had language, Jaynes obviously believes that bicamerality is ancient and ancestral. All humans, in other words, descended from these hallucinating hunter-gatherers. Much later in time some of these hunter-gatherers (those in the Near East) developed agriculture and the “voices” were pressed into the service of social control. Even when the ruler-god isn’t present, people hear voices and attribute the commands of those voices to the ruler-god.

It’s all very tidy. The problem, however, is that the bicameral mind on which everything is built and depends eventually breaks down. The story that Jaynes tells about the breakdown is remarkable, indeed fascinating, but for my purposes the details are unimportant. All we need to know is that in complex agricultural societies, pressures and contradictions increase until the bicameral mind finally dissolves: it becomes unified or unicameral. This is the beginning, for Jaynes, of “consciousness.” It is the hallmark of fully modern minds which recognize the voice inside the head not as “god” but as “I.”

It is that this point that Jaynes’ story, still believed by many, runs into deep trouble: some groups of people never practiced agriculture, never lived in complex societies, and never experienced a breakdown of bicameralism. These people are of course hunter-gatherers, many of whom continued foraging until relatively recently and some of whom still do. These groups, descended directly from the hallucinating ancients, presumably retained bicameral minds and lacked “consciousness.”

If this were the case (it isn’t), our histories and ethnographies would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales about bicameral hunter-gatherers. They would have been strange beings incapable of recognizing that the voices inside their heads weren’t real. While this is the obvious implication of Jaynes’ theory, we needn’t take my word for it. Here is how recent “pre-literate tribal” people are described by the Jaynes Society:

They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred.

This is stunning. It reads like a racist Victorian description of non-European subhumans, and if I didn’t just pull it from a website advocating Jaynes’ views, that’s what I would think it was.

Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated. Nothing in the ethnohistoric or ethnographic record suggests this and in fact the opposite is true. What we find in the record is that these people, despite their different histories and cultures, were (and are) just like us.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian. (1986). Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (2), 128-148 DOI: 10.1037/h0080053

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