Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Bodily gestures of a wide variety of forms are intrinsic features of ritual. In some forms of Christian liturgy there is sequential movement involving kneeling, sitting, standing, and going to the altar to receive communion. Muslim prayer and Buddhist ritual, among others, involve forms of prostration. Bodily gestures become elaborated in dance, a frequent element in ritual, one that is common to many traditions. Fundamental to dance is rhythmic movement, and rhythm is related to physiological regularities such as heartbeat and breathing. Breathing itself has become focal in Buddhist meditation: a one-pointed attention to breathing, which unites the inner and the outer, can become a unitive experience. The posture of meditation, the lotus posture of the Buddha, was seen by the Japanese Zen master Dogen as enlightenment. Those who sit in Zen meditation are enlightened already; there is nothing more to expect.34

  R. R. Marett said of tribal religion that “it is something not so much thought out as danced out.“35 But it is not only for “primitives” that the enactive is primary. William Butler Yeats wrote, six days before his death: “I know for certain that my time will not be long … I am happy and I think full of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say `Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life.“36 We will see that truth is a problematic idea and that not everyone would agree with Yeats that it must be embodied. Yet one of the historic religions rests its claim to truth on the incarnation.

  Symbolic Representation

  We may begin the consideration of the complex subject of symbolism by attending to the phenomenon of play, inasmuch as Piaget links the beginnings of symbol formation in the child to what he calls “symbolic play.” For Piaget, symbols “assimilate” reality to the needs, wishes, desires of the child.37 As an example of the assimilative function of symbolic play Piaget writes: “A little girl who while on vacation had asked various questions about the mechanics of the bells observed on an old village church steeple, now stood stiff as a ramrod beside her father’s desk, making a deafening noise. `You’re bothering me, you know. Can’t you see I’m working?’ `Don’t talk to me,’ replied the little girl. `I’m a church.’” The little girl, one is tempted to say, was also ing,” making sense of a perhaps intimidating experience. In this case we can see how close the symbolic is to the enactive. The child enacts the steeple, but it is only her visual and audible, not her motor, experience of the steeple that allows her to do so. Insofar as there is some image of the church, more is involved than in what Piaget calls “exercise play,” which is the child’s first, purely sensorimotor, form of play.38 Here the symbol makes possible the integration of inner and outer, experience and feeling, self and world.

  In the young child, Piaget tells us, perception is “egocentric,” but what he means is that self and world are as yet undifferentiated parts of a whole. Somewhere Piaget tells of a boy who, on a sunny day, gets into a car in Geneva for a trip to Basel. On arriving, the child gets out, looks up, and says, “Oh, the sun came with us.” We could say that the child has not yet located himself and the sun in what Schutz called standard time and space. There is a dynamic quality to the child’s world that leads Piaget to speak of the “animism” of the child.39

  Piaget’s examples of symbolic play are largely solitary, as when a little girl “works through” with her dolls an unpleasant scene at lunch where she had refused to finish her soup. In the reenacted scene the little girl shows more understanding of the doll’s distaste for the soup than her mother had shown in fact. 40 Bruner gives an example of symbolic play that intrinsically requires an adult as well as a child. This is the common game of peekaboo, whose “deep structure” is “the controlled disappearance and reappearance of an object or person,” but whose surface structure can be varied almost infinitely in terms of who or what disappears (a doll, a teddy bear, the mother’s face, even the child’s face), of what screens the object that has disappeared, of the length of time of the disappearance, and so forth.`*i What is interesting is how fascinated the children Bruner studied were with this game, which began in the preverbal early months of the first year and continued long past early language learning. Several things are interesting here. If a stranger attempts to play this game with a very young child, the result will almost certainly be tears. If the mother plays, the result is often laughter. Peekaboo is playing with one of the child’s deepest anxieties, the fear of being left by the mother or caregiver. It would seem to be an instance of what Bruner elsewhere calls “bring[ing] the young to the edge of terror,” a normal part of parental play with children. 12 The child takes what we might almost call a ritualistic delight in the endless repetition of a game that arouses anxiety and dispels it. Peekaboo may perhaps be seen as coping with the elemental problem of what Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia” called the lost object. 43

  Before going on to consider more closely the various subtypes of symbolic representation, I would like to turn to Paul Ricoeur for a splendid explanation of why it is worth looking at the psychic origins of religious symbolism in the life of children:

  To manifest the “sacred” on the “cosmos” and to manifest it in the “psyche” are the same thing.

  Perhaps we ought even to refuse to choose between the interpretation that makes these symbols the disguised expression of the infantile and instinctual part of the psychism and the interpretation that finds in them the anticipation of our possibilities of evolution and maturation. Later we shall have to explore an interpretation according to which “regression” is a roundabout way of “progression” and of the exploration of our potentialities … Re-immersion in our archaism is no doubt the roundabout way by which we immerse ourselves in the archaism of humanity, and this double “regression” is possibly, in its turn, the way to a discovery, a prospection, and a prophecy concerning ourselves.

  It is this function of symbols as surveyor’s staff and guide for “becoming oneself” that must be united with and not opposed to the “cosmic” function of symbols as it is expressed in the hierophanies described by the phenomenology of religion. Cosmos and Psyche are the two poles of the same “expressivity”; I express myself in expressing the world; I explore my own sacrality in deciphering that of the world”

  Iconic Symbolization

  As in the case of the little girl who was a church, the relation between iconic and enactive representation is a close one. I. A. Richards told Bruner that images are “full of muscles. 441 Indeed, the first thing 2-year-old children create when they discover what they can do with a crayon is the scribble, something still primarily enactive.46 The crayon is an extension of the child’s body; the pleasure is in the movement. The child is not “making a picture,” certainly not making a picture of something. The child is the picture. As with every element of the child’s expression, we can quickly think of sophisticated adult versions. It is not just the look of Jackson Pollock’s paintings that comes to mind but the fact that he called them action paintings, capturing something close to Bruner’s notion of enactive representation.

  Not long after scribbling begins, the child discovers shape. the earliest shapes are swirls, not too different from random scribbles, but beginning to look like something round.47 Of course, the child is incapable of anything approaching a perfect circle, but vaguely circular shapes begin to appear. Between ages 3 and 4, shape develops into outline, which may be circular or four-sided.41 The child appears to be playing with form. But form of what? Adults with their strong sense of difference between self and world want the form to be a form of something. But what the child is doing with the circles and squares and the cross marks dividing them and the spokes coming out of them is as much expressing the child’s own sense of bounded form in an emerging self as anything in the world. And yet it is probably not only to please adults that the child will call a circle with spokes coming out of it the sun or a flower, for the child is making sense of the world as well as the self and seei
ng balanced form in both. Kellogg and O’Dell in their wonderful book on the psychology of children’s art are probably not overinterpreting when they see mandalas in the crossed circles and similar forms that emerge in profusion in children’s paintings between ages 3 and 5 49 The mandala (the term is Buddhist) is a centered design, sometimes of great complexity and remarkable sophistication, that is to be found not only in India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia but in Navajo sandpaintings, medieval European rose windows, modern sculptures, and so forth. Whatever else it is, the mandala is an expression of ordered coherence, a fundamental human concern, and so it is not surprising that it appears spontaneously in the paintings of young children as well as in a variety of high cultural expressions.

  Amid the transformations of design, around the ages of 4 and 5, children produce forms that are identifiably, if “abstractly,” people. A round form with spokes, a “sun,” gets a stem and becomes a “flower,” and then gets a face and becomes perhaps not just a person, but “me.” Children’s art is close to Piaget’s symbolic play, but perhaps symbolic play is an element in all art. Though humor is common in children’s art, we must not forget that psychologists also speak of “serious play,” a term that might be applied to high art and ritual alike, as we shall see in later chapters.

  Musical Symbolization

  If images are “full of muscles,” music is even more obviously kinesthetic. In considering enactive representation we have already had occasion to notice that rhythm is characteristic of bodily life and that early on it gets expressed musically and in the dance. Music, if we may say so, reaches right into the body. Indeed, music without some bodily response is hard to imagine: I am always amazed at the stillness of impassive audiences listening to Bach or Vivaldi, with only a very occasional head moving. If one looks at the musicians who are not at the moment playing, one usually can pick up slight bodily movements or silent foot tapping. I remember being unnerved, when on one occasion as an adolescent I was by chance sitting next to Otto Klemperer at a Bach concert, by the fact that he kept meticulous time to the music with his finger on his knee throughout the entire concert. At concerts of classical music the conductor (Stokowski, Bernstein) is the only one permitted to “dance” to the music, though we can vicariously (and at home with the hi-fi not so vicariously) enjoy it. Singing is also inevitably enactive. In some forms of Protestant worship, singing is the only moment in the service when bodily action, the full-throated use of the vocal chords, is appropriate, and even then one must keep rather still while singing.

  I am not saying that music divorced from bodily movement (at least for the hearer-never for the performer) cannot communicate; obviously it can. If it were not so, we could not speak of musical symbolism as something beyond enactive representation. Yet there is something mysterious about musical symbolism compared to iconic or poetic symbolism. What does musical symbolism symbolize? The commonest modern answer, and an adequate one as far as it goes, is that music symbolizes feeling. Susanne K. Langer gives a sophisticated version of this view:

  The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling … The lasting effect is, like the first effect of speech on the development of the mind, to make things conceivable rather than to store up propositions. Not communication but insight is the gift of music; in a very naive phrase, a knowledge of “how feelings go.“50

  Alfred Schutz, while agreeing with Langer that musical meaning cannot be paraphrased verbally or conceptually, differs from her in seeing music as quintessentially communicative:

  We have therefore the following situation: two series of events in inner time, one belonging to the stream of consciousness of the composer, the other to the stream of consciousness of the beholder, are lived through in simultaneity, which simultaneity is created by the ongoing flux of the musical process. It is the thesis of the present paper that this sharing of the other’s flux of experience in inner time, this living through a vivid present in common, constitutes what we mutual tuning-in relationship, the experience of the “We,” which is at the foundation of all possible communication. The peculiarity of the musical process of communication consists in the essentially polythetic character of the communicated content, that is to say, in the fact that the flux of the musical events and the activities by which they are communicated, belong to the dimension of inner time.51

  Although Schutz emphasizes communication as strongly as possible, what is being communicated is the “flux of experience in inner time,” first of the composer, but through the performance becoming one with the performers and the hearers. As Schutz puts it, in a musical performance composer, performers, and audience “grow old together”-that is, share inner time together (even though the composer, and in a recording, the performers as well, may be dead at the time of hearing).52

  What modern interpreters largely ignore is what premoderns in many traditions assume: that music is related not only to inner reality but to cosmic and social reality as well. In the passage from Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” already cited, Scipio is depicted as hearing the “music of the spheres.” In the classical Mediterranean world this idea goes back at least to Pythagoras: “Pythagoras, who in the sixth century B.c. discovered the orderly arrangements of the musical scale, had elevated that order to the heavens. Like the seven notes of the octave, the seven planets moved in a harmonic progression and so made a `music’ which, as tradition had it, Pythagoras claimed to have heard on several occasions.“53 By late antiquity the initiate was called upon “to enact with his body and with his voice the entire cosmic scheme” in “a song both human and divine.“54 Here the inner time of the performers is united with the inner time of the cosmos. Similar ideas can be discovered in sophisticated form in Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi piety and in more general form probably very widely in the premodern world.

  For some premoderns, and this idea has never entirely died out, music has not only personal and cosmic meanings but social meanings as well. This is the idea that music can bring social harmony, or, conversely, that the wrong kind of music can bring social breakdown. Allan Bloom, in his somewhat perverse book The Closing of the American Mind, argued the latter thesis with respect to the (rock) music listened to by contemporary college Bloom, being a Platonist, probably got the idea from his master. In book 3 of the Republic, Plato wishes to regulate the musical modes in his ideal city. The psychological meaning of music is not missing here; indeed, it is central. Music brings order (or disorder) to the soul and thus attunes or fails to attune the individual to social and cosmic order.

  This idea of music is shared by Confucius, who paired music with the rites as the most significant ways of uniting personal, social, and cosmic order. In earlier Chinese tradition the potentialities of music could be drastic indeed. Arthur Waley recounts:

  Music, in the view not only of primitives, but in that of almost all nonEuropean peoples, exercises a magic power not only over the heart of man (as we in Europe would to some extent admit), but also over the forces of nature. Everyone familiar with early Chinese books knows the story, existing in countless variants, of Duke P’ing of Chin and the baleful music-how drawn by the magic of an evil tune eight huge black birds swooped from the south and danced on his terrace, black clouds blotted out the sky, a tempest tore down the hangings of his palace, broke the ritual vessels, hurled down the tiles from the roof; and the king fell sick, and for three years no blade of grass grew in Chin, no tree bore fruit.56

  Confucius’s view of music was considerably more modest. Like Plato he saw music as having a central role in the education of the young. Like Plato he was conscious of the varying qualities of musical modes and melodies and the importance of regulating them for the sake of effective government. Analects 15:
11 says:

  Yen Yuan asked about the government of a state. The master said, “Follow the calendar of the Hsia, ride in the carriage of the Yin, and wear the ceremonial cap of the Chou, but, as for music, adopt the shao and the wu. Banish the tunes of Cheng, and keep plausible men at a distance. The tunes of Cheng are wanton and plausible men are dangerous.“57

  That Confucius himself was very susceptible to the right kind of music is indicated in another passage (7:14):

  The master heard the shao in Ch’i and for three months did not notice the taste of the meat he ate. He said, “I never dreamt that the joys of music could reach such heights.“58

  Nomos, which means both ethical norm and musical measure, was at the heart of Plato’s philosophy. Eric Voegelin describes his deathbed scene: “Plato died at the age of eighty-one. On the evening of his death he had a Thracian girl play the flute to him. The girl could not find the beat of the nomos. With a movement of his finger, Plato indicated to her the Measure.“59

  Whether we think of music as representing feelings, or as representing order (and disorder) in the soul, society, and the cosmos, music has a characteristic that is common to all forms of symbolization: it participates in that which it represents. If it signifies at all, it signifies intrinsically, not arbitrarily, by what it is, not only by what it points to.