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

by Robert N. Bellah

  While all these stories are regarded as traditional accounts of ancestral activities, it is obvious that we have here a narrative projection of the cyclical day-after-day experience of daily routine and a recounting of the sorts of incidents and behavior also possible for the most part in the ongoing present of Walbiri daily life. It is, in effect, this repetitive daily existence that is going under the label djugurba, ancestral way of life.102

  The myths that serve as the scenarios of rituals and are told by the men who “own” those rituals are only somewhat more elaborate versions of the stories told by women. The same daily round-sleeping, hunting, eatingprovides the substructure of the myths, but they focus on the actions and in particular on the travels of named Ancestral Beings from specific place to specific place. The complex designs on sacred stones and boards as well as painted on the bodies of ritual dancers use the same basic graphs as the women’s sand drawings, but in more elaborate form. The lines that represent the tracks from camp to camp are more prominent than in women’s drawings which focus on the circles which indicate the camps themselves. The ritual myths tell of how the Ancestral Beings formed the landscape-rivers, hills, or water holes-or how they became themselves some remarkable rock formation or other geographical feature. Nancy Munn sums up what she calls the Aboriginal “world theory” as the “coming-out” and “going-in” of the Dreamings: as Swain summarizes it, “something came out of, moved across, and went into, the earth,” forming the world as it did so.103 Though the Aborigines sometimes say that when an Ancestral Being went into the earth (or became some remarkable feature of the landscape), it “died,” at the same time it remains fully present at all the sites of its wandering. Swain quotes T. G. H. Strehlow as saying that the Aranda, another central desert group, believe “in the simultaneous presence of the Ancestor at each of the many scenes which once witnessed the fullness of his supernatural powers.””’

  If in the myths the Ancestors are described as forming the natural world, they are also seen as forming the social world, establishing customs and rituals as they travel though the landscape. Although we speak of “Ancestral Beings,” the Walbiri do not think of themselves as biologically descended from such beings. Rather they believe that such beings scattered guruwari, fertility powers or powers of generation, and left them in the soil as they traveled. Women then become impregnated by these powers, so that their children have the spirit of the Ancestral Being.los Guruwari also means the design, and its associated song, which represents the Ancestor. Boys during the initiation ceremonies touch objects with the design and are thus born again from the Ancestral guruwari. Thus human beings are linked to each other by their relationship to these beings; patrilineages derive from their connection to the Ancestral Beings, kinship being less fundamental than association with place.106

  But not only is society formed through linkages between humans and the Ancestral Beings, so is the entire moral order. Another and even more common way the Aborigines refer to what I have been calling the Dreaming is the Law or the Ancestral Law.107 Marcia Langton, herself an Aborigine, describes what Aboriginal Law entails:

  What our people mean when they talk about their Law, is a cosmology, a worldview which is a religious, philosophic, poetic and normative explanation of how the natural, human and supernatural domains work. Aboriginal Law ties each individual to kin, to “country”-particular estates of land-and to Dreamings. One is born with the responsibilities and obligations which these inheritances carry. There are many onerous duties, and they are not considered to be optional. One is seen to be lazy and neglectful if these duties are ignored and the respect, authority and advantages, such as arrangements for good marriages, opportunities for one’s children, are not awarded. As many of our people observe, Aboriginal Law is hard work.108

  Among the Walbiri, Meggitt describes the Law as follows:

  There are explicit social rules, which, by and large, everybody obeys; and the people freely characterize each other’s behaviour insofar as it conforms to the rules or deviates from them. The totality of the rules expresses the law, djugaruru, a term that may be translated also as “the line” or “the straight or true way.“109 Its basic connotation is of an established and morally-right order of behaviour (whether of planets or of people), from which there should be no divergence …

  As the law originated in the dreamtime, it is beyond critical questioning and conscious change. The totemic philosophy asserts that man, society and nature are interdependent components of one system, whose source is the dreamtime.110

  If the Dreamings give accounts of how the cosmos is formed, they also give accounts of how one should act in society. For example, a central desert story tells of how an Ancestral Being was attracted to a woman of a kin category that made her a potential mother-in-law to him, and thus sexually taboo. He was so overcome with desire that he raped her, but she closed her legs in such a way that her vagina dismembered his penis. The Aborigines can show you the rock that represents her vagina with the stone-penis still embedded in it. The Ancestral Beings, it seems, were no better than we are, but what happened to them can be exemplary of how the Law functions.

  Even though the Law may entail “hard work,” and we should note that Aboriginal ceremonial life, in which the Law is reenacted, requires indeed a great deal of hard work, its end is renewed vitality. The Walbiri associate feelings of “happiness and well-being” with ceremonial, and believe that, after a social disturbance, a ritual performance will make people “happy” again.”’ One of the commonest forms of Walbiri ritual is the banba, or “increase” ceremonies, performed for the animal or plant species “owned” by a patrilineal group or at least by the patrilineal moiety to which the group belongs. These are indeed “totemic” rituals, but we need not get involved in worrying about the meaning of “totemism.“112 The totem of a patrilineal group is simply the Ancestral Being in its animal form and its geographic place with which the group is identified. As Meggitt has pointed out, the ceremonies are not intended so much to “increase” the relevant species as to ensure its normal maintenance, so “cosmic maintenance rituals” might be a better designation than “increase rituals.“113

  The particular totem does indeed “belong” to a particular group, but it does so in a context of many totems belonging to many groups, all of which are needed if cosmos and people are to survive.114 In banba ceremonies, not only are “owners” necessary, but “workers” from the opposite moiety are also necessary, indeed do much of the work of preparing the ceremony. And the vitality of the species that the ceremony is intended to enhance serves the welfare of all the people, not just the “owners.” That Aboriginal ideas of ownership do not fit Anglo-Saxon property law has given rise to many painful misunderstandings. “Owning” a site does not mean exclusive rights to its economic exploitation; on the contrary, it means the obligation to maintain its fertility for the use of all. What the actors in the ritual are doing is recreating the guruwari, the creative potency, of the Ancestral Beings. As Munn puts it: “Through their performance, the masters [what I have called the “owners”] realize the generative potential of the ancestral forms: it is as if they change ancestors into descendents, and so maintain the continuity of species and

  In describing the Kalapalo, I concentrated on ritual and its central form, music. In treating the Australian Aborigines, I have moved to a greater concern for narrative, but the centrality of narrative is only relatively greater than among the Kalapalo, and ritual in general, and song in particular remain prominent. I have already mentioned that every guruwari, ancestral potency, has its associated song. The Ancestors leave songs behind in each place they visit and the songs, in turn, are reminders of the larger narrative of which they are a part. In Cape York there is an account of an Ancestral Being who, under Melanesian influence, is on the way to being a “hero” of an un-Aboriginal type, yet his proclivity to sing links him to the continental pattern:

  Dreamings are, as Paul Ricoeur would put it, redescrip
tions that add something, emplotment, to what they describe.117 What is remarkable about Aboriginal narrative, at least of the central desert variety, is how little it adds, even though that little is critically important. Abiding Events and ordinary events overlap to a remarkable degree. It is in this sense that for the Aborigines life is what Stanner calls “a one-possibility thing.” 118 As he says, “their Ideal and Real come very close together.“119

  It is not that the Aborigines lack “the metaphysical gift,” the ability, as Stanner puts it, “to transcend oneself, to make acts of imagination so that one can stand `outside’ or `away from’ oneself, and turn the universe, oneself and one’s fellows into objects of contemplation.” Nor do they lack a drive “to `make sense’ out of human experience and find some `principle’ in the whole human Nonetheless, “the overruling mood is one of belief, not of inquiry or “This is why, among them, the philosophy of assent, the glove, fits the hand of actual custom almost to perfection, and the forms of social life, the art, the ritual, and much else take on a wonderful

  But Swain argues that this symmetry, this closeness of the Ideal and the Real, this emphasis on abidingness, persists and can persist only as long as ubiety reigns. Once place is lost, or even threatened, there is a “fall” into time and history, the glove no longer fits, and the yearning for another time, another place begins. He illustrates this “fall” with several Aboriginal cases, which I cannot here pursue at length, but two of which I must at least mention.

  Aboriginal Australia has been cited, notably by Mircea Eliade, following Pater Schmidt, as an important case of Urmonotheismus, primeval monotheism, because of the “High Gods,” or “Sky Gods” to be found there.121 But among the central desert peoples that I have focused on there are no High Gods, indeed no gods at all. The Ancestral Beings, like the powerful beings of the Kalapalo, are not worshipped but identified with in ritual enactment. It was the absence of gods, worship, even prayer, that led early Western observers to declare that the Aborigines had no religion at all, thus missing entirely the rich web of belief and practice that in fact characterize Aboriginal life. So where are these High Gods, this primeval monotheism?

  Eliade does argue for the existence of such among one central desert group, the Aranda, but Jonathan Z. Smith has pretty completely demolished the evidence Eliade cited for that argument.124 The main evidence for High Gods, even “Supreme Beings,” is to be found in Southeast Australia, which, as Tony Swain points out, suffered the earliest and most devastating incursions of European Indeed, the context for the emergence of High Gods in Southeast Australia was “devastation, death and dispossession.“126 Once removed from the “country,” which was itself alive with the traces of Ancestral Beings, the remnant population of Aborigines, having lost 80 percent or more of their people to infectious disease for which they had no immunity, if not to massacre, borrowed from their conquerors a different cosmology from their traditional one. A creator God, often called Baiami (the first report of this deity was from the Wellington Valley Mission in the 1830s) was said to have abandoned the earth and removed to the sky. Because the earth is devastated, the land of fertility and plenty is now located in Heaven, where the Aboriginal people can go after death. Baiami is the All-Father, not located anywhere in particular, ubiquitous, not ubietous, but definitely not of this earth. The split between earthly place and Heavenly ubiquity is mirrored in another most un-Aboriginal split: between good and evil. But far from simply mimicking their conquerors, this split is not between those who do good and those who do evil (the very idea of evil is un-Aboriginal) but between Aborigines and whites: only Aborigines go to Heaven. The loss of locative grounding led to a new un-Aboriginal concern with time. Not only was Baiami a creator, there was also the possibility, not envisaged in the central desert, of an end time, indeed a Millennium, in which all the whites would board their ships and sail away, leaving Australia once again to its native inhabitants. Swain does not argue that these new beliefs were “syncretistic,” even though they borrowed the ontology of the conquerors, but rather that they were a revolutionary leap in Aboriginal thinking brought on by catastrophic conditions. Only in the late twentieth century were Baiami beliefs harmonized with Christianity.127 Although Swain does not generalize his argument beyond a careful reassessment of the material on Southeast Australia, I think it not unlikely that the popular view of the religion of native North Americans-namely, that they believe in the Great Spirit and that after death they will go to the Happy Hunting Ground in the sky-is, to the extent it represents any Native American belief at all, a result of catastrophic contact conditions.128

  The second case that differs from the central desert peoples is the Northwest where changes were, as in the Southeast, stimulated by the incursion of strangers, coming at about the same period as the whites to the Southeast, namely, late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, but in this case from the island of Sulawesi in present-day Indonesia.121 The people that the Aborigines called “Macassans,” but who probably included several ethnic groups from Sulawesi, were far less intrusive than the whites in the Southeast: they came in search of trepang, the sea cucumbers that were profitable in the China trade. They did not so much want to take Aboriginal land as to establish coastal enclaves for reprovisioning. Whereas the Aborigines failed utterly and to their consternation to bring the white invaders in the Southeast into any relation to the Law, the Macassans were uneasily but successfully included in it, even to the point of establishing some intermarriage.

  Contact with the Macassans did not result in a sense of profound loss, but rather of vague uneasiness, an awareness that the world is larger than the “country” so essential to Aboriginal consciousness. And the ritual response, though significant enough, was less drastic than in the Southeast. That ritual response took the form of a cult of the All-Mother, as opposed to the AllFather of the Southeast. The All-Mother was not a Sky God, certainly not a Supreme Being, but simply a Being who arrived on the northern shore from across the water (Swain indicates she may have been a creative Aboriginal adaptation of a Sulawesi agricultural goddess, a “Rice Mother”)130 and now journeyed from place to place much like other Ancestral Beings. But her cult became, like Macassan contact, “international,” namely spreading from group to group, even reaching the central desert by the late nineteenth century, though it is interesting that by the time it reached the Walbiri the central figure had become male: as Meggitt says the Walbiri Gadjari rite had become a Mother-cult without the Mother.13’

  The best description of a Mother-cult is W. E. H. Stanner’s account of the Punj initiation ritual and the myth that goes with it among the Murinbata, a people who live not far from the Northwest coast. The myth is about Mutjinga, the Old Woman, who unaccountably swallows the children and must be killed in order that the children can be recovered from her womb (not her stomach). The myth has an overtone of sadness, of “sad inevitability,” as Stanner puts it, for it is an account that illustrates the “immemorial misdirection” in human affairs.132 The Aborigines have no explanation of why Mutjinga went wrong: they say, “she should have lasted a long time”; “the people did not want to kill her”; “she went wrong herself”; and ultimately, “it is a thing we do not The Murinbata, says Stanner, “have stopped short of, or gone beyond, a quarrel with the terms of life. Their myths are evidence that they reflected and felt a fatal impairment, but the rites are evidence that they met the issue in a positive way.“134 Summing up, Stanner says that Murinbata ritual is not just ceremonial but celebration and that “it allows them to assent to life, as it is, without morbidity.“135 Nevertheless, the overtone of sad finality that correlates with the transplaceness of the Mother-cult suggests a shift, far subtler than the drastic symbolic revolution in the southeast, from the soberly sanguine life of the desert. Life for the Murinbata may still be a one-possibility thing, but it had become more tenuously so.

  One feature of Aboriginal life has struck many of its most careful observers: the almost complete lack of
imperial ambition. There are almost no cases of war for territorial expansion throughout the whole continent. This does not at all mean that the Aborigines weren’t violent. The chances of being murdered in an Aboriginal society were probably higher than in most contemporary societies, but the killings were for revenge, for alleged sorcery, for sexual infidelity, and so on, not for territory. Although there were many linguistic groups, “tribes” did not really have boundaries. Ancestral Beings wandered all over the continent and their tracks could be traced through the territory of many groups. But the “owners” of sacred places were merely their custodians, and the places would not yield their fertility to those ignorant of the local ritual, so there was just no point in territorial expansion.

  For this and for other reasons, some of which should be evident even in my brief summary, several serious students of Aboriginal culture have concluded that, far from being “primitive,” Aboriginal culture is in some ways superior to our own. (I am not speaking of “New Age” enthusiasts for Aboriginal “spirituality,” who seldom understand it and instead read into it their own presuppositions about “Eastern” thought.) One of these serious students, David H. Turner, and he was a student even to the extent that he learned to play a difficult Aboriginal musical instrument, has published an article entitled “Australian Aboriginal Religion as `World Religion,”’ a title that speaks for itself.136 Turner has published a trilogy of books that get at, among other things, the “complementary opposition” that allows the Australians to avoid our proclivity toward ever greater and ultimately self-destructive expansion.137 Another is Deborah Bird Rose, who defends Aboriginal ultimate pluralism against our Western tendency toward imperial monism.13s Tony Swain, in seeing the emergence of Sky Gods as a “fall” from ubiety, does not find that such a fall represents “progress.” I wish to join these distinguished scholars in affirming that the world still has much to learn from the Aborigines.